Indigenous Astrology
Links http://profiles.arts.monash.edu.au/duane-hamacher/ Astronomy http://www.aboriginalastronomy.com.au/ :"The First Nations cultures of Australia – Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders – speak over 250 distinct languages and stretch back for over 65,000 years. This makes the First Australians the oldest astronomers and the oldest continuing cultures in the world. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people developed a number of practical ways to observe the Sun, Moon and stars to inform navigation, calendars, and predict weather. Australia’s First Nations people assign meaning and agency to astronomical phenomena, which informs Law and social structure. It also serves as the foundation for narratives that are passed down the generations through song, dance, and oral tradition over tens of thousands of years. :“Indigenous astronomy” is the first astronomy – the astronomy that existed long before the Babylonians, Greeks, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. This website explores the many aspects of Indigenous Astronomy in Australia." http://www.aboriginalastronomy.com.au/content/topics/ http://www.aboriginalastronomy.com.au/content/topics/starmaps/ :"A songline is a story that travels over the landscape, which is then imprinted with the song (Aboriginal people will say that the landscape imprints the song). Robert then learned that there were many routes/songlines from Goodooga to destinations as far as 700km away, which might end up in a ceremonial place, or possibly a trade “fair”." :"Another surprising result of this knowledge came about when Robert was looking at the star map routes from Goodooga to the Bunya Mountains and Carnarvon Gorge in Queensland. When the star map routes were overlaid over the modern road map, there was a significant overlap with major roads in use today. After some reflection, the reason for this became clear. The first explorers in this region, such as Thomas Mitchell, who explored here in 1845-1846, used Aboriginal guides and interpreters, who were likely given directions by local Aboriginal people." http://www.aboriginalastronomy.com.au/content/topics/supernovae/ :"This is exactly what William Edward Stanbridge experienced when two men of the Boorong clan (of the Wergaia language group, claiming to have the best knowledge of astronomy of all Aboriginal groups in that region) taught him their star lore, reciting the stories as they pointed out the stars overhead. Stanbridge,..., sat attentively, writing down the Boorong stars and their equivalent Western names using a star atlas. Berm-berm-gle… Alpha Centauri. Djuit… Antares. War… Canopus. When the men pointed to Collowgullouric War (the wife of War, the Crow, pronounced “Wahh”), he could not identify the bright star. Using his chart, he simply writes “Large red star in Robur Carol, marked 966. All the small stars around her are her children”, and continued to record the remaining stars.... :For nearly 150 years, the identification of Collowgullouric War remained a mystery. In 2011, Duane Hamacher and David Frew published a paper in which they identified that particular star. This was no ordinary star… it is one of the most massive stars known, called Eta Carinae. This enigmatic object is actually a binary, has a combined mass of more than 100 suns, and is 4 million times more luminous than our little home star. The larger star of Eta Car is unstable and undergoes occasional violent outbursts, where it sheds material from its outer shells, making it exceptionally bright. During the 1840s, Eta Carinae went through such an outburst where it shed 20 solar masses of its outer shell and became the second brightest star in the night sky, after Sirius, before fading from view a few years later. This event, commonly called a “supernova-impostor” event, has been deemed the “Great Eruption of Eta Carinae”. The remnant of this explosion is evident by the Homunculus Nebulae. This identification shows that the Boorong had noted the sudden brightness of this star and incorporated it into their oral traditions." http://www.narit.or.th/en/files/2018JAHHvol21/2018JAHH...21...07S.pdf YES, ABORIGINAL AUSTRALIANS CAN AND DID DISCOVER THE VARIABILITY OF BETELGEUSE :"Recently, a widely publicized claim has been made that the Aboriginal Australians discovered the variability of the red star Betelgeuse in the modern Orion, plus the variability of two other prominent red stars: Aldebaran and Antares. This result has excited the usual healthy skepticism, with questions about whether any untrained peoples can discover the variability and whether such a discovery is likely to be placed into lore and transmitted for long periods of time. Here, I am offering an independent evaluation, based on broad experience with naked-eye sky viewing and astro-history. I find that it is easy for inexperienced observers to detect the variability of Betelgeuse over its range in brightness from V = 0.0 to V = 1.3, for example in noticing from season-to-season that the star varies from significantly brighter than Procyon to being greatly fainter than Procyon. Further, indigenous peoples in the Southern Hemisphere inevitably kept watch on the prominent red star, so it is inevitable that the variability of Betelgeuse was discovered many times over during the last 65 millennia. The processes of placing this discovery into a cultural context (in this case, put into morality stories) and the faithful transmission for many millennia is confidently known for the Aboriginal Australians in particular. So this shows that the whole claim for a changing Betelgeuse in the Aboriginal Australian lore is both plausible and likely. Given that the discovery and transmission is easily possible, the real proof is that the Aboriginal lore gives an unambiguous statement that these stars do indeed vary in brightness, as collected by many ethnographers over a century ago from many Aboriginal groups. So I strongly conclude that the Aboriginal Australians could and did discover the variability of Betelgeuse, Aldebaran, and Antares." https://twitter.com/RowenaBall/status/1074545453989941248 @RowenaBall Replying to @DuaneHamacher :"So our Indigenous ancestors invented a type of spatial Fourier transform 10000s years before French mathematician Joseph Fourier "invented" it in 1822. The songline is the transform - the inverse is the route. Maths students should be taught this! " @RowenaBall Replying to @RowenaBall @DuaneHamacher @IndigenousX :"Just as the time-frequency domain transform is the good-oil whereby we pick out patterns in signals, the Indigenous songline-route transform, transmitted by strict rules in song, is deadly important to wayfinding. Much more sophisticated than simple one-to-one maps of the whites!" Articles https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-12/aboriginal-astronomy-provides-clues-to-ancient-life/7925024 The world's oldest observatory? How Aboriginal astronomy provides clues to ancient life Fitzsimmons2016 :"An ancient Aboriginal site at a secret location in the Victorian bush could be the oldest astronomical observatory in the world, pre-dating Stonehenge and even the Great Pyramids of Giza." *Key points: :Researchers say site could date back more than 11,000 years :Believe stone arrangement mapped out the movements of the sun :Site could also disprove notion that first Australians were uniformly nomadic hunter-gatherers :Scientists studying the Wurdi Youang stone arrangement say it could date back more than 11,000 years and provide clues into the origins of agriculture." :"Scientists studying the Wurdi Youang stone arrangement say it could date back more than 11,000 years and provide clues into the origins of agriculture. :Duane Hamacher, a leader in the study of Indigenous astronomy, has been working with Aboriginal elders at the site to reconstruct their knowledge of the stars and planets. :"Some academics have referred to this stone arrangement here as Australia's version of Stonehenge," Dr Hamacher said. :"I think the question we might have to ask is: is Stonehenge Britain's version of Wurdi Youang? Because this could be much, much older." :If the site is more than 7,000 years old, it will rewrite history and further disprove the notion that first Australians were uniformly nomadic hunter-gatherers." :"Scientists believe the arrangement of stones was able to map out the movements of the sun throughout the year. :Custodian Reg Abrahams said the region around the observatory seemed to have once had semi-permanent villages with evidence of early fishing and farming practices. :"If you're going to have a stone arrangement where you mark off the seasons throughout the year with the solstices and equinoxes, it kind of makes sense if you're at least most of the year in one specific location to do that," he said. :"So if that's the case, it would make sense if you're near permanent food and water sources." :He said there were areas where eel traps would have been set up and even signs of "gilgies", or terraces used in farming. :"You see a lot of agricultural and aquacultural practices, so evidence of this agriculture may go back tens of thousands of years, pre-dating what anthropologists commonly think of as the dawn of agriculture which is about 11,000 years ago in Mesopotamia," he said." Category:Ancient Astrology Category:Culture Category:Indigenous Culture